Reuniting Graham and Meadows, who worked together on the seminal This is England, The Virtues is a powerful, bold drama that tackles themes of repressed memory, revenge and the hope of redemption.

Graham stars as Joseph, a barely-on-the-wagon alcoholic whose reality is knocked for six when his ex-partner moves abroad with their young son for a better life.

With no immediate family to live for, Joseph is haunted by a past he has tried for decades to forget – if not actively obscure with drink and drugs.

Suffering the hangover from hell – the dry spell over – he walks away from his present life and boards a boat bound for Ireland to confront hazy, fear-inducing memories of a childhood spent in the care system that he’s had to forget.

‘They had my name’

But perhaps the darkest thing about The Virtues, is that it’s based on Meadows’ own real-life experiences of the sexual abuse he suffered as a child.

“I only want to talk about this once,” he told The Guardian. “You’re [interviewer Miranda Sawyer] the only person I’m going to tell. There was an event in my life that happened at an unbelievably unlucky moment in time.”

Things were already going badly for Meadows after the summer of 1982, when his dad, Arty, was arrested on suspicion of murder after he found the body of 11-year-old Susan Maxwell beside the A518.

Meadows’ father was eventually released without charge, having been wrongly accused of the crime, but the incident and the media furore around it affected Shane and the family immeasurably.

“They [the papers] had my name” he told The Guardian. “They put a picture of my dad in when he was 18, when he was a rocker – rather than 28 and a dad of two – so he looked like he could be really dangerous.”

Shane was sent to his aunt’s to get away from the commotion, when one day he went to the local park for a moment’s thought.

“Then these two brothers came up.”

‘I can remember this feeling of abomination’ (Photo: Channel 4)

‘It felt like the Book of Revelations’

Meadows was nine at the time. The brothers – one his age, the other roughly four years older – picked on him, recognising him from the media storm around his family.

They made him go into the woods, and once there, the older brother sexually abused him.

“I can remember this feeling of abomination,” he told The Guardian, on the immediate wake of the incident. “I started wetting the bed, all the classic signs were there.”

The memory of that awful day was repressed. “I knew they’d picked on me, bullied me, but that was it. It was like every ounce of me knew, but I didn’t remember it, so I must’ve blocked it.”

Meadows’ life was changed forever – teenage years thieving and taking drugs were triggered by the trauma – but even in adult life, the dog-walking routes never took him anywhere too close to the woods.

“Every five or six years, I’d have these massive depressions or anxiety attacks,” he said. “Really bad. Dragging me into the pits of hell, it felt like the Book of Revelations.”

“You feel that sense of panic, but not understand it or why it affects your life on a daily basis.”

At The Virtues’ premiere screening, Meadows said: “The very basis, the acorn of Joseph’s journey, was borne out of something that happened to me as a kid.”

‘The very basis, the acorn of Joseph’s journey, was borne out of something that happened to me as a kid’ (Photo: Channel 4)

‘I’m not scared any more’

Now, The Virtues is a way for Meadows to reconnect with his attacker of nearly 40 years ago.

“Fundamentally, when I discovered this thing,” said Meadows at The Virtues’ premiere screening, “I went into a place of trying to track down the people that had done it.”

“But I knew if I confronted him, if at any stage in that conversation he smirked at me, I was probably going to jump over the table and bite something off his face.”

“All I wanted was to be able to sit down with this guy, via Stephen Graham,” he told The Guardian.

“I’m not scared or ashamed any more. Plenty of people have been through far worse and they’ve told their stories. What happened to me is the reason the series exists.”

And the reason for the show’s title – “I don’t think we should be celebrating people who’ve made the FTSE 100.

“One of the last sessions I had with the psychologist, he said to me, ‘Imagine you could go back and make that event not happen. The risk is that you quite possibly wouldn’t be doing what you’d be doing now. Would you go back and change it?’ And I know I wouldn’t.

“You don’t know why a tramp is what he is. How could you look down your nose at someone on the street? For some people just to lead a sober life is heroic, way better than running a conglomerate or making political decisions.”

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